Nowadays people outside China are
probably most familiar with the riverside skyline of Shanghai’s Pudong area, an
ultra-modern forest of gleaming skyscrapers – the heart of big business and
banking in modern mainland China; but some might be aware of the Bund on the
opposite bank of the Huangpu river, equally renowned throughout the globe as glitzy
and modern in its own day at the start of the last century. And some may even
be familiar with the phenomenon of ‘nail houses’, which have provided some iconic
images of resistance to this fast paced rush towards urban renewal. Such houses
are a contentious political issue in China, where the land is state-owned and
tenants who dispute the official offers of re-housing and compensation put to
them often face acts of unofficial coercion designed to compel them to leave.

Smashed roofs and windows, power
supplies cut and piped water turned off are just some of the tactics used in attempts
to make such houses uninhabitable. Once the tenants are gone, both those buildings
vacated without fuss and those eventually vacated by pressure, are striped bare
of every salvageable and saleable commodity. All that remains usually are the memories
of their former inhabitants etched upon the very fabric of those walls; the former
homes which have witnessed generations being born, growing up, and growing old
beneath those sheltering roofs. Often several families at a time during the Mao
era crammed themselves into tiny rooms within a single home, with rows of such tenements forming tight knit communities without much space for privacy. All
that’s left is often only the wallpaper.

“Have
nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be
beautiful.”

These are the words of William Morris, from his Hopes and Fears for Art (1882).
Morris and his ideas about art and profit form the keystone of Bollen’s project
in this book. Inspired by Morris’s own work, a pattern book from the V&A’s
collection and closely mirroring its Golden Type typeface, Bollen’s Wallpaper is a series of photographs punctuated
with quotes taken from Morris, these excerpts become the headings under which Bollen’s
images are grouped; they form the themes that explore these deserted shells, leaving
us staring at the haunted qualities caught within a moment’s shutter-click. But
it’s these haunted elements that speak most clearly of the human. These images
capture the transience; they speak of lives laid bare. The disowned decorations
of lives which have chosen to move away or been forced to move on, unknown
lives which once were here but have now passed on

“History
(so called) has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; Art
has remembered the people, because they created.”

2 comments:

Fascinating and poignant. I have occasionally seen a similar intimate absence in Glasgow when tenements have collapsed, or been knocked down for development, for example with the Commonwealth Games. There is a privacy that has been turned inside out. It must be worse in Shanghai when so communities have been forced out and torn apart, especially for soulless development.